Marion is a novelist, as well as a technical and medical writer, policy developer, and data analyst. She holds the Master of Public Administration from East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. She has worked as a project manager and long-form feature writer for a number of publications for more than 30 years, and has contributed to marketing campaigns via pamphlets and website information for universities and nonprofit agencies. She also writes essays and experimental fiction. 

She grew up in a country house beside curing barns on a tobacco farm in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, with bird dogs and an acre of daylilies. She later moved to a family home in Rocky Mount, Machaven, and attended the North Carolina Governors School in high school.

She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a French major and honors. Her undergraduate courses included upper-level history and political science courses in addition to a year at Montpellier, France, where she studied theater, politics and deconstruction theory.

During a year in Paris, she obtained a master's degree in 19th- and 20-century French literature from the Sorbonne with special mention from the faculty.

In the mid-1990s she lived in Prague, Czech Republic writing fiction, poetry and serving as theater critic, foreign news editor, news writer and feature writer for The Prague Post. She taught English to Czech students, amusing them with its complex verb constructions. They in turn shared with her the many noun declentions, plural and gender constructions of their language.

She is presently completing a series of novels set in an authoritarian future where animals are confined in former sports stadiums and processed into a slurry for consumption, and where protesting, freedom of movement, gardening, and eating vegetables are crimes.

As the District 3 representative on the Greenville, N.C. City Council (2009-2015, 2022-present) she works for clean energy, parks and alternative transportation. She is a marathon runner with two dogs and several cats. 

Marion Blackburn

The Sonic Agency

Greenville, North Carolina

Phone: two five two - nine three one - zero seven two eight

For information please contact

info (at) marionblackburn.net